James Joyce’s father once commented on his son: "If that fellowwas dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he'd sit, be God, andmake a map of it."

In this rumination on the Joycean mindset,John Joyce wasn't talking about the novelUlysses—he had few words of praise forthat book—but he might very well havebeen describing the process which led tohis son's imposing literary map of Dublin. And the senior Joyce may have played apart in this process too. He shared James'sinterest in the byways and notable locales of the city, and perhapseven inspired it with their shared walks, during which John Joycepointed out Dublin's literary landmarks—the home of Jonathan Swift,the birthplace of Oscar Wilde, the places where Joseph Addison hadstrolled before them, and other such sites of interest.

But nowadays anyone looking at a literary map of Dublin will see thatit has been rewritten since that time, and mostly by James Joycehimself, whose most famous work involves a stroll around the city thatmany of the author's admirers emulate, often on June 16—the date onwhich Ulysses takes place (picked by Joyce because this was the dayof his first date with his future wife Nora)—but on other occasions aswell. Even in his lifetime, Joyce celebrated this anniversary, and heardfrom readers of Ulysses who also commemorated 'Bloomsday', asit has come to be called. In the mid-1950s, Bloomsday showed thefirst signs of turning into a kind of Dublin-based Mardi Gras, with arecreation of Leopold Bloom’s stroll, in period costume, starting fromthe character's home on Eccles Street, and following an itinerary thatincluded McConnell Street, Parnell Square and the Martello Tower. But like St. Patrick’s Day, Bloomsday has become a celebration inwhich everyone gets to be Irish for 24 hours—it is now commemoratedin at least sixty countries, as well as virtually on the web.

A real life stroll that Joyce took in 1904—not on Bloomsday, but fourdays later on June 20—may have served as the initial spur that led toJoyce's later writing of Ulysses. Well, not really a stroll, more like astumble. For this author, so fascinated by fallen characters—HumptyDumpty, Adam, and Finnegan all show up in his books—came to hismost famous work via a couple of falls of his own.

Joyce was often chided about his drinking by his brother Stanislaus,who feared that he would destroy his considerable talent by hisdissipated ways. On that June evening, Joyce had so much to drinkthat he first caused a scene at the premises of the Irish Literary Theater, where he collapsed on the floor near the entrance, and others had tostep over the promising young author, who was sprawled in his ownvomit. But Joyce had another fall in store for him before the night wasover, even more painful than the first. After rising from this first stupor,he got into an altercation with a soldier. Joyce was badly bruised in the encounter—his later thumbnail summary was: "black eye, sprained wrist, sprained ankle, cut chin, cut hand"—but the future author of Ulysses was rescued that evening by a person who was almost a complete stranger.Alfred H. Hunter, a slight acquaintance of Joyce's father, found theyoung writer in some distress, and brought him back to his own hometo sober up and recover from his wounds.

Joyce was impressed by Hunter’s unexpected intercession, and alsoby the character of the man who had played the role of Good Samaritan. Hunter was Jewish and allegedly a cuckold—in both ways a prototypefor Leopold Bloom—and the incident planted a seed that would later'bloom' into Ulysses. Two years later, on September 30, 1906, Joycesent a letter to his brother in which he announced that he was planningon turning this encounter into a story, probably a short work akin tothose he had already written for Dubliners. In another letter, fromNovember 13, he mentions the idea again, and now it has a name:"I thought of beginning my story 'Ulysses', but I have too many caresat present."

Clearly the connection with Homer's Odysseywas already in Joyce’s mind. And if Hunterwould turn into Bloom, who would representUlysses, Joyce already had a real individualand fictional character slated for the part ofTelemachus, Ulysses's son: the author himselfand his literary alter ego Stephen Dedalus. By November 1907, Joyce had changed hismind of the scope of the work, and nowbegan describing it as a novel. His brotherStanislaus writes in his diary on November10: "Jim told me that he is going to expandhis story 'Ulysses' into a short book and makeDublin a 'Peer Gynt' of it….As it happens inone day, I suggested that he should make a comedy of it, but he won't."

Even though Joyce, as these comments make clear, had already decided,at this early stage, to embrace the Aristotelian unity of time—which limitsthe span of events to 24 hours—his ambition to create a Dublin-based equivalent of Homer's Odyssey demanded a much larger scope thanany he had previously attempted. On June 16, 1915 he told his brotherthat he envisioned 22 episodes in his Ulysses, but by May 1918 hehad scaled back his plans and told Harriet Weaver that there would be seventeen. The finished work had eighteen episodes, and amountedto a massive 350,000 word novel—more than twice as long asDubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man combined.

Yet almost every detail, incident and character in this sprawling bookwas first experienced by Joyce himself or collected from the real-world accounts of others before getting processed and transformed into theform of fiction. Sometimes the connections are complex—at least ahalf-dozen different women contributed in some degree to the characterMolly Bloom—but the various lineages invariably link back to actualpeople and circumstances. Joyce may have gained fame as the writerwho pushed fiction the furthest in modern times, but in another way hecan be seen as the author who took the fewest liberties with his subject. He did not create ex nihilo but rather ex materia.

Even the character in Ulysses who seems to occupy the oppositeend of the spectrum from Joyce / Dedalus, namely Leopold Bloom,also reflects aspects of the author, or at least his idealized image ofhimself. The high profile of a Jewish protagonist in the great Dublinnovel is neither a departure from the book's Irishness nor a detourfrom the autobiographical essence of the work. Joyce saw himselfas an exile from Ireland, both rooted in his homeland and at odds withit—an attitude that made him especially sympathetic to the plight ofIrish Jews. (In Finnegans Wake, the hero appears to be a Protestant,so the contrast with the pervasive Catholicism of Ireland is echoed inthe later book too.) But this convergence was more than a matter ofJoyce's psychological leanings. The era during which our authorcame of age was a time of Irish diaspora. Already in 1890, whenJoyce was just eight-years-old, two out of every five persons of Irishdescent in the world were living outside of Ireland, and the exoduscontinued non-stop for decades to come. True, the Irish—unlike theJews at the time—possessed a homeland; but even at home, the Irishlacked sovereignty. The country would not gain independence fromBritain until 1922. Joyce often commented on the similarities betweenthe Irish and Jewish temperament, but just the brute facts of historysupported his insight that Leopold Bloom of Hungarian-Jewish ancestry,could serve as a suitable emblem both for an ambitious Irish authorand his long-suffering fellow Dubliners.

Joyce thus had two levels of meaning with which to launch his grandnovel, a personal, autobiographical one and a Homeric epic one. Andhe also saw each of these stories as representing a larger culturalhistory—drawing on parallels between Irish and Jewish destinies. But in time, other levels of signification were woven into the book. Each chapter, as he saw it, could 'embody' a different organ of thebody. But he also wanted to use the book to showcase a litany ofdifferent ways of writing. Joyce later defined "the task I set myself"as "writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in asmany styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellowtradesmen." The end result was a novel that infuriated many, amazedothers, but—love it or hate it—stands out as one of the most ambitious projects in the history of literature.

The construction of this book, for all its challenges, was only a preludeto more obstacles to come. Finding a publisher posed a different setof problems. And the publisher needed to find a printer who was notafraid of criminal prosecution, given the book's content and theobscenity laws of the days. And even after it was published, could itbe distributed without customs agents seizing and burning the books? And if it made its way into a bookstore, could it be sold without drawinga response form police and prosecutors? At every step of the way,Joyce faced potential stumbling blocks.

Thus James Joyce had his own perilous odyssey ahead of him, andhis project took almost as long as Ulysses's own in the Homeric epicsto complete. Homer tells us that Odysseus spent ten years fightingthe Trojan War and another ten years in his much delayed journeyhome. For Joyce, the timetable is even more protracted. Ten yearselapsed between the 1904 events that inspired the book and the commencement of its writing. Eight more years transpired beforeUlysses was published by Sylvia Beach in Paris. Joyce needed towait another eleven years before the court decision that allowed saleof the book in the United States. Almost thirty years after Bloomsday,in January 1934, the first US edition was released. The first UK editiondid not come out until 1936.

In fact, someone could write a book about the making of Ulysses, andbase it on the Odyssey as well. We have all the ingredients here—angryrivals at home in Ithaca (or Dublin, in the case of Joyce), and foes and obstacles in other farflung settings, everything conspiring to prevent the protagonist from fulfilling his destiny. But achieve it he did. Along theway, Mr. Joyce proved—in more ways than one—to be the hero of hisown story. This was the one layer to Ulysses that Joyce never intendedto add. It was forced upon him by circumstances, most of them arisingafter the book was written. But I can’t help but find it fitting and properthat, in an age in which art became increasingly self-referential, themost avant-garde of novels proved so maddeningly true-to-life.